Perils of Technology

Isn’t technology great? You can type, make mistakes, have your word processor correct spell and grammar mistakes, rather than typewriters (which although are great and fun to use) require you to get it right first time. On a typewriter I would have had to have written this sentence over four…five times.

I have a usb stick, which means that I can take my story with me wherever I go, it’s always there. And most of the time, I can use it on any computer I come across.

The internet, the most glorious resources that we could ever have for research, right at the tip of our fingertips!

BUT

Sometimes technology is a butt.

A right butt.

I’m doing Camp NaNo this month, I told you all about that. On Saturday, I sat down at my computer, and I found the groove. 4,000 words were carefully pruned, edited, polished. It was a good feeling.

Yesterday, I gamed all day. It was a good day.

Today, I open up the document, I go to the place I was editing. And there’s a gap.

A huge gap.

A 4,000 word shaped gap.

I was SO annoyed.

And it’s not like I didn’t save it! I checked the meta data, it was the right time and date for when I had been editing it on Saturday. And it wasn’t a previous version. It was just gone. The only logical thing I can think happened was that after I selected the text to do my wordcount for the day, I must have accidentally hit the delete key before saving it and closing down. And I didn’t notice, which means that I saved it, and thus there is no magical CTRL + Z trick to get back all that work.

It’s a horrid feeling when you realise that you aren’t getting that work back.

But, strangely, it wasn’t all that off putting. I didn’t throw my hands up and say “bother this, let’s do something else”, I actually went back to the previous draft, got the old words, and I’ve been re-editing that section today.

So yeah, sometimes, I hate technology. Mostly I love it, but sometimes, like that hour this morning. Yeah, hate it.